


Stella, Stella for Star

by Livvykitty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcoholism, Fluff, Sadstuck, at first anyway, death mention, i suffered while writing this now its your turn to suffer, rose is basically asking her mom why she doesnt have a dad, set around year 1 on the meteor, so much sadness after, teenage alcoholism, which devolves into her remembering something and being sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 03:39:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5896702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livvykitty/pseuds/Livvykitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of a fallen star.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stella, Stella for Star

“Mama, why don’t I have a Dad?”

Rose Lalonde, five years old, had once asked that of her mother. Her mother didn’t have one of those drinks in her hands that made her loopy like the night before, and she was simply dusting off one of the many paintings of wizards that littered the home. She was settled on the couch, leaning over the back of it, small face peeking over the enormous fluffy cushions like a groundhog popping its little head up from the ground. It was then when her mother turned, looking back at her with a little bemused look on her face. “What was that, dearest?”

So Rose, not quite comprehending why her mother would ask again if she’d obviously heard the first time, asked again, “I said, why don’t I have a Dad? Did he get put where you work? Is that why you always spend time at your, lab- labro- lab-or-a-tory?” The child knew that it wasn’t normal not to have a father around the house. The Squiddles on the television had little colorful families, and the characters in those books that she snuck from her mother’s stash had a father and a mother, so why didn’t Rose? It was a question that she had been bound to ask eventually, an inquiry that all children eventually work up the nerve to inquire of, and of course Rose had been a curious little runt. She wanted to know things, especially things that it didn’t seem that she would get an answer to unless she did some digging around on her own.

“Well dear, that explanation is easy as pie!” Her mother smiled, making her way over to the couch and walking around the back of it, sitting beside Rose. The little girl had crawled into her lap, and then her mother had started to speak. “Now see, a lot of things have mommies and daddies, but not everything does. You see, a lot of things that don’t have a daddy aren’t from this world- they’re from up there.” She had pointed vaguely up at the ceiling then, tilting her head up.

Rose had craned her neck, looking at the high plaster roof that provided shelter for her dubiously. “They’re up on the roof?” 

Her mother had chuckled, and shaken her head. “No, no, not there. Maybe that wasn’t the best way to phrase it- come with me, and I’ll show you.” Rose had pushed herself off of her mother’s lap, because at such an age she had convinced herself that she was a big girl and therefore didn't need to be carried everywhere, and toddled after her mother’s long legs as she started up the stairs, onto the second floor. Her mother had waited at the top of the stairs for the girl to come up safely, before unlocking a door that Rose had never seen opened before. 

Rose could hardly believe her eyes when she saw that! She was always told by her mother that the room was secret, that it was a very special place that she would show Rose only when she was ready to see it. She was quick to follow after her as she climbed the long stairs, her head running at a million miles per hour, millions of light years flashing by, as she wondered. She wondered if they were going up here so that her mother could show her where the fatherless things were. Maybe she had even been joking and had hidden her father away all this time! It was an exciting prospect, and one that was forgotten when her mother bent down and scooped her up, taking her outside onto a walkway with no railings.

Rose remembered how dizzy she had felt, how far away the ground had looked as she gripped tightly onto the fabric of her mother’s shirt, then feeling just as disoriented when the view of the ground was obstructed as she was taken inside again, going up another flight of stairs. This led to a door, which her mother unlocked, and then she had been set down onto the ground so that her mother could sweep into the room with a grand gesture, arms reaching out towards the sky that arched high overhead, a sky protected by the glass bubble that they were in.

“You see all that, Rosie?” Her mother had said, looking to where her daughter had come into the center of the room, looking up at the stars above, eyes wide, mouth agape. “ _ They _ don’t have any daddies. The stars. And you wanna really know why you don’t have a dad yourself?” Rose had nodded, intrigued beyond anything else, enthralled by the sight and too awed to speak. Then Roxy had swooped down and gathered Rose up, holding her up high, as if she could reach just a little bit more and place her up on the moon. 

“ _ You’re _ a star, Rose! A fallen star, one that your old Mama was lucky enough to find!”

Rose had laughed then, feeling at the center of all things, held up by the arms of the strongest human alive. With those stars winking at her from up above, her little question had been sated, her curiosity abated. Her mother had lowered her enough so that she could wrap her arms around the woman’s neck, loving, in a pillar of warmth and surrounded by space, suspended up in the air in a little bubble all their own.

Rose had never shined brighter than that before.

 

~*~

 

Rose was cold.

She didn’t know whether it was the cold metallic room that would surely become her tomb, or if that was just the fact that she was always, always cold now, an arctic ocean rolling with waves and ice caps, frigid and feeling it lapping at her skin like thousands of tongues. 

She was shaking, was it from cold or the force of tears wracking her body? She could barely tell anymore. She wanted it all to be numb. If someone doesn’t feel, then they can’t miss all the things that they should have appreciated, but didn’t. If someone banishes emotion, they can continue on, push these ugly thoughts down, push them down, down deep, bury them and hope they never resurface, pray they suffocate under the weight of nothingness and just be snuffed out. But she wasn’t so lucky. She cared too much, too terribly. She hated it. She hated having to feel.

And why, of all times, did she have to remember that? Why did she have to lay on the cold ground and watch in the darkness that surrounded her the wavering visages of the last bit of true happiness she must have felt, before it was all taken away? Why did she have to hear in her mind, playing on repeat, broken fractions of sounds,  _ you’re a star, you’re a fallen star, fallen, fallen fallen fallen  _ an endless loop, a word that has no meaning. Sounds that form phrases, phrases that shouldn’t make sense, lines from a script, oh  _ stella, stella for star, open your pretty mouth and talk while i look for some liquor _

She almost surprised herself when she moved her arm, hand closing around the neck of a bottle,  _ i spy i spy _ , half empty half full half drunk half gone, all for her now never for anyone else. The wine is too sweet- she remembered that little taste of what her mother liked back on her planet, looking out over the multi-colored sea, wondering if she should toss the drink in, deciding not to because she loved her mother terribly even then, loved her and was convinced that she would come back again and drink and even if she hated it she understood that it helped, it made things easier to bear, made it easier to try and forget

_ Where where where is  _ yes where is anyone else right now, or has she forgotten? They’re elsewhere, of course, she doesn’t want anyone else, she wanted to asphyxiate in the smoke of her own delirium away from them, put logs in front of the hole and cower behind and wait for her drug of choice to take effect, but its too much too much its always too much and she’ll eventually vomit back up the sorrows that she tried to keep hidden, sweetened with wine.

She tasted iron with her next gulp of wine, red as blood, welling up on her tongue and stinging with the syrup of alcohol, if she bites hard enough maybe it’ll be bitten clean off, but right now she can’t stay like this, not like this, not on one thought

_ You’re a star, a star,  _ she said once,  _ a fallen star _ and Rose knew that she was crashing and burning, breaking apart at the seams, and that eventually she would get back up like a phoenix from the ashes and pretend to be put together again, pretend that she wasn’t trying to repeatedly drown herself in these waters only to be spat back out by the sea, bobbing and bobbing and floating when she wants nothing more than for the sea to swallow her up, nothing more than for the sea to fill the air with the smell of pink and her soul to rest, finally.

Even then, even with the knowing, that made it worse, and the sounds that she made were horrifying and ugly, not fit for someone sane, not fit for a girl laying on the ground and imagining back when she was five and when her mother loved her as she loved her then and when her mother wasn’t just a corpse on the ground with no life left in her blood and bones being turned to dust, trying to fight against the memory of a broken record playing something that once left her feeling like the universe was inside and like nothing in the world was bad or wrong and she wasn’t crying out into the darkness for her mother like a child

Another broken record joining the first, a pitiful bout of sound. A child cries into the dark, feeling more dead than when a year before she allowed those beings of rage to possess her body, when she’d killed herself for her friends. A child is left in a dark room with nothing but the stink of alcohol on her breath and words lingering from the past to comfort her, begging, pleading.

“Mama…”


End file.
